Academic Commons Search Resultshttp://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog.rss?f%5Bsubject_facet%5D%5B%5D=Germanic+literature&q=&rows=500&sort=record_creation_date+desc
Academic Commons Search Resultsen-usArnold Schering, "Die Eroica, eine Homer-Symphonie Beethovens?": Translated with an Introduction and Commentaryhttp://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:180889
Stanley, Glennhttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8765D3GFri, 19 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000In this translation and commentary of Schering's "Die Eroica, eine Homer-Symphonie Beethovens?", Stanley provides insights regarding the historical, philosophical, and musical implications of the symphony.Music, Germanic literatureMusicArticlesForever Young: Youth, Modernism, and the Deferral of Maturityhttp://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:178185
Kueveler, Janhttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D82N50V9Tue, 30 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000This dissertation is about adolescents in European literature between 1900 and the First World War who shy away from maturity. The authors discussed are Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Robert Musil, Georg Büchner, J. M. Barrie, Robert Walser, Rudyard Kipling and Witold Gombrowicz. The main argument is that the remarkable proliferation around 1900 of novels whose protagonists, by some means or other, avoid growing up is not due to a somewhat twisted affiliation to the genre of the late and ultimately failed Bildungsroman, but rather to an underestimated branch of modernism. At first glance, their strategy of retreat looks like a flinching from societal responsibility, yet the opposite turns out to be true. Instead of representing an early instance of the prolonged adolescence that has nowadays become proverbial, their recoiling from maturity entails a critique of the totalizing tendencies inherent to the ideals of Bildung and Enlighten­ment.Comparative literature, Germanic literature, European studiesjck2110English and Comparative LiteratureDissertationsChildhood Bonds--Günter Grass, Martin Walser and Christa Wolf as Writers of the Hitler Youth Generation in Post-1945 and Post-1989 Germanyhttp://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:176606
Nordmann, Juliahttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8BK19GCTue, 03 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, public discourse in German society has been repeatedly riven by debates prompted by three leading figures of the literary scene: Günter Grass, Martin Walser, and Christa Wolf. The tremendously emotional controversies regarding Wolf's purported cowardice as a GDR-writer, Walser's alleged anti-Semitism, and Grass's membership in the Waffen-SS served to confirm the significance of these writers, which, I argue, stems not only from their literary merits, but also from their status as former members of the Hitler Youth. Building upon Sigrid Weigel's claim that generations in post-war Germany act as symbols of the country's relationship to the Nazi past, my dissertation elucidates the process by which Grass, Walser, and Wolf were adopted--and adopted themselves--as proxies for a "better Germany." The biographies of these three writers, I argue, came to represent the overarching political goal of both post-war German states: the successful transition from an intimate association with the Nazi regime - in the authors' case, their associations with the Hitler Youth - to a full embrace of democratic values. The conflation of the writers' biographies with national identity explains their authority and popularity in both German societies. It also explains why the process of detachment from these writers as political figures began after 1990 as national identity changed after reunification. With the waning of the Hitler Youth generation's dominance in the public sphere, a re-evaluation of the writers' political and literary work, set against the backdrop of their generational identity, is long overdue. In four chapters, this dissertation examines key moments in the careers of Grass, Walser, and Wolf. I emphasize the striking similarities between the generational discourse of the two West-German writers and the East-German writer, while pointing out where their shared generational background led to distinct political agendas. I show that the literary output, self-understanding, and public reception of arguably the three most significant writers in the post-war Germanies cannot be understood without a consideration of this mutual historical-biographical legacy. My dissertation thus rewrites an important part of post-1945 and post-1989 cultural history.Germanic literature, History, Holocaust studiesjn2168Germanic LanguagesDissertationsThe Imagination of the Jewish Table in German and German-Jewish Literature, 1530-1914http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:174606
Falk, Annie Elizabethhttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8W37TD3Tue, 15 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000This dissertation investigates the imagination of the Jewish table in German and German-Jewish letters. Examining ethnographic, iconographic and literary depictions of the Jewish table from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, I argue for its significance as a key site in the German imagination of the Jews, a locus of fantasies regarding the nature of Jewish religious practice, social community and corporeal difference. The work of the dissertation proceeds in two stages. First, I identify a wealth of fantasies concerning the alimentary behavior of the Jews that have existed in German letters since at least the early sixteenth century. Then, I argue that these various myths of Jewish eating and drinking persisted well into the modern period, experiencing a covert afterlife in literary texts from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Two broader conceptual aims of the dissertation are to argue for the significance of the table motif in the social, religious and aesthetic contexts and to draw attention to the typically neglected topic of food themes in literature. The dissertation begins with a study of the Jewish table as it was imagined in polemical ethnographies of the Jews written in the German language from the early sixteenth to the mid eighteenth century. Based on my reading of these sources, I identity four main features to the imagination of the Jewish table in the early modern period. Jews supposedly refuse to eat with Christians out of hatred and fear of fraternization with them. They exhibit immoderate behavior at table and lack a proper code of alimentary ethics. They eat copious amounts of garlic and exude a foul stench, the foetor judaicus, as a result. Most damningly, they consume the blood of innocent Christian children in their Passover Seder meals. Against this background I turn my attention to the modern period and show how literary (con)texts become the medium in which authors--Jews and non-Jews alike--receive and reinterpret these myths of the Jewish table. In Chapter 2, I analyze two distinctive table cultures of the turn of the nineteenth century, the Jewish salon and the Christian-German Table Society, and argue that participants used the idea of table fellowship as a microcosm for imagining Jewish-German social relations at large. In Chapter 3, I juxtapose Heinrich Heine's defiant materialist stance and cryptic celebration of Jewish cuisine in Der Rabbi von Bacherach with Wilhelm Raabe's evocation of Jewish appetite in Der Hungerpastor. Chapter 4 focuses on the resurgence of the blood libel at the turn of the twentieth century. I analyze a trio of German and German-Jewish fictions from the fin de siècle that feature the fantasy space of the Jewish table and in some cases invoke the myth of ritual murder, including Arnold Zweig's Ritualmord in Ungarn, Theodor Herzl's Altneuland and Thomas Mann's Wälsungenblut.Germanic literatureaef61Germanic Languages and LiteraturesDissertationsReading Kafka in Prague: The Reception of Franz Kafka between the East and the West during the Cold Warhttp://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:172916
Tuckerova, Veronikahttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D84J0C5KTue, 15 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000This dissertation explores the transmission, reception, and appropriation of Franz Kafka in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, against the background of the contemporary international readings of Kafka, especially in West Germany. The first chapter examines Paul Eisner's translation of the Trial in the context of his influential triple "ghetto theory" and from the perspective of his contemporary translation discourse as well as recent translation theories. The second chapter focuses on the reception of Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka, and the reasons why this controversial text was welcomed in the West and dismissed in the East as a forgery. The chapter uses new archival discoveries about Janouch and discusses questions of witness and testimony. The role of "witness" took an ominous turn in the case of Eduard Goldstücker, who is the focus of the third chapter. Goldstücker was tried in the Slánský show trials in the early 1950s and forced to testify against Slánský. The chapter explores how Goldstücker attempted to come to terms with his past through reading of Kafka. The secret police files that were kept on him provide new insights on Goldstücker's published texts, public persona, and the Liblice Conference that succeeded in rehabilitating Kafka in 1963. The last chapter examines the samizdat publications of Kafka's works. This chapter spans the 1960s to the 1980s Underground culture and examines the appropriation by Ivan Jirous of the "ghetto" topos and Kafka for the Czech Underground. I address the following topics: the status of witness as a legitimization of an "authentic" reading, censorship, the interplay between politics and literature, and the construction of authorship.Germanic literature, Comparative literature, Slavic studiesvt2002Germanic Languages and LiteraturesDissertationsToward a Poetics of Animality: Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Pirandello, Kafkahttp://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:172838
Driscoll, Kárihttp://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8V69GNKFri, 11 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000Toward a Poetics of Animality is a study of the place and function of animals in the works of four major modernist authors: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Luigi Pirandello, and Franz Kafka. Through a series of close readings of canonical as well as lesser-known texts, I show how the so-called "Sprachkrise"- the crisis of language and representation that dominated European literature around 1900 - was inextricably bound up with an attendant crisis of anthropocentrism and of man's relationship to the animal. Since antiquity, man has been defined as the animal that has language; hence a crisis of language necessarily called into question the assumption of human superiority and the strict division between humans and animals on the basis of language. Furthermore, in response to author and critic John Berger's provocative suggestion that "the first metaphor was animal" I explore the essential and constantly reaffirmed link between animals and metaphorical language. The implication is that the poetic imagination and the problem of representation have always on some level been bound up with the figure of the animal. Thus, the "poetics of animality" I identify in the authors under examination gestures toward the origin of poetry and figurative language as such.Germanic literature, Comparative literaturekd2180Germanic LanguagesDissertationsSpaces of the Ear: Literature, Media, and the Science of Sound, 1870-1930http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:161522
Whitney, Tylerhttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:20396Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000Spaces of the Ear examines the concomitant emergence of new forms of acoustical embodiment across the diverse fields of literature and science in the historical period beginning with the Franco-Prussian War and ending with the introduction of early information theory in the late 1920s. In opposition to popular accounts of changes in listening practices around 1900, which typically take the disembodied voices of new media such as the phonograph and radio as true markers of acoustical modernity, the dissertation emphasizes the proliferation of new modes of embodied listening made possible by the explosion of urban and industrial noise, contemporary media technologies, the threat of auditory surveillance, and the imposition of self-observational and self-disciplinary practices as constitutive of artistic, scientific, and everyday life. In doing so, I show how distinct elements of modern soundscapes and corresponding techniques of listening informed both the key thematic and formal elements of literary modernism. In particular, I argue that modernism's often-cited narrative self-reflexivity drew on conceptions of a uniquely embodied listener and the newfound audibility of the body, and overlapped with contemporaneous scientific knowledge surrounding the physiology of the ear and the role of the body in the perception of sound. Chapter 1 focuses on the role of non-literary discourse on urban noise and the cacophony of the modern battlefield in formal developments central to late nineteenth-century literary aesthetics, taking the largely forgotten Austrian impressionist Peter Altenberg as my primary case study. In Chapter 2 I analyze the ways in which Franz Kafka appropriated elements of the modern soundscape and, in particular, ontological disorders common to the factory worker, in conceptualizing the mechanisms of the modern legal system and its epistemological and perceptual effects on its subjects. Chapter 3 again focuses on works by Kafka, this time juxtaposing scientific practices of self-observation within acoustical research with Kafka's literal and metaphorical figurations of self-auscultation and its function as a narrative strategy in "The Burrow" (1923/24). Chapters 4 and 5 sketch out a competing conception of hearing within Gestalt psychology, early stereophonic sound experiments, and literary texts by Robert Musil, which portray the modern listener as surprisingly active and confident in deciphering and navigating an increasingly complex auditory environment. In the process, the site of acoustical embodiment is displaced from the side of the subject to that of the object, engendering notions of "auditory things (Hördinge)" with physical, corporeal properties, which can be traced through space as three-dimensional entities. In the final chapter, I situate the effacement of the listener's body and simultaneous foregrounding of `auditory things' in Musil's novella, "The Blackbird (1928), against the backdrop of early information theory and non-corporeal notions of Rauschen (noise, rustling, static).Germanic literature, History of sciencetrw2105Germanic Languages and LiteraturesDissertationsThe Transatlantic Renewal of Textual Practices: Philology, Religion, and Classicism in Madame de Staël, Herder, and Emersonhttp://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:178471
Wagner, Ulrikehttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:14973Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000This dissertation demonstrates how the rise of historical criticism in Germany transformed practices of reading, writing, and public address in the related fields of classicism and biblical criticism in a transnational context. In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, writers on both sides of the Atlantic rendered these practices foundational to the goals of self-formation, cultural and spiritual renewal, and educational reform. In this process, Germaine de Staël's De l'Allemagne (1814) played a key role in disseminating new historically informed modes of teaching, preaching, translating, and reconstructing secular and religious texts among Transcendentalists. I show that her cultural study epitomizes crucial characteristics and functions of the historically informed textual practices that Johann Gottfried Herder's works articulated paradigmatically in Germany and which we find refracted in reviews, addresses, essays, and translations by many Antebellum American scholars, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson.Comparative literature, American literature, Germanic literatureauw2101Germanic Languages and LiteraturesDissertationsJews Behind Glass: The Ethnographic Impulse in German-Jewish and Yiddish Literature, 1900-1948http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:176788
Spinner, Samuel Jacobhttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:14513Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000This dissertation demonstrates that German and Yiddish literature about Jews from the turn of the twentieth century until after the Holocaust is characterized by several discourses and tropes borrowed from contemporary ethnography, anthropology, and folklore studies. The influence of these disciplines is manifest in the representation of Eastern European Jews as primitive savages, the depiction of the Jewish people as being at risk of extinction, the articulation of the need to salvage European Jewish culture, and the literary conjunction of folklore with contemporary instances of violence against Jews. These motifs are especially prominent in the works of Alfred Döblin, Franz Kafka, and Arnold Zweig in German and S. An-sky in Yiddish. This dissertation identifies the permutations of these ethnographic discourses in German-Jewish and Yiddish literature, opening new avenues of exploration in the study of the literary and cultural construction of Jewish identity in European modernity.Germanic literature, Judaic studiessjs2107Germanic Languages and LiteraturesDissertationsIn the Shadow of the Family Tree: Narrating Family History in Väterliteratur and the Generationenromanehttp://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:151972
Cameron, Jennifer Susanhttp://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:14496Thu, 23 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000While debates over the memory and representation of the National Socialist past have dominated public discourse in Germany over the last forty years, the literary scene has been the site of experimentation with the genre of the autobiography, as authors developed new strategies for exploring their own relationship to the past through narrative. Since the late 1970s, this experimentation has yielded a series of autobiographical novels which focus not only on the authors' own lives, but on the lives and experiences of their family members, particularly those who lived during the NS era. In this dissertation, I examine the relationship between two waves of this autobiographical writing, the Väterliteratur novels of the late 1970s and 1980s in the BRD, and the current trend of multi-generational family narratives which began in the late 1990s. In a prelude and three chapters, this dissertation traces the trajectory from Väterliteratur to the Generationenromane through readings of Bernward Vesper's Die Reise (1977), Christoph Meckel's Suchbild. Über meinen Vater (1980), Ruth Rehmann's Der Mann auf der Kanzel (1979), Uwe Timm's Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003), Stephan Wackwitz's Ein unsichtbares Land (2003), Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe (1999), and Barbara Honigmann's Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (2004). I read these texts as examples of genealogical writing, in which protagonists seek to position themselves in relation to their family histories through the construction of family narrative. The formal similarities between the two trends - (inter)textual dialogue, hybridity of prose style, vignette or essayistic structure - cast their underlying differences into greater relief. While the author-narrators of Väterliteratur seek to reach a definitive conclusion regarding the question of the father's complicity in Nazism, the authors of Generationenromane allow for greater nuance in categories such as victim and perpetrator. In both cases, however, the subjectivity of the individual protagonist shapes his or her engagement of the family past, as they seek to negotiate between personal family relationships and public discourses of collective memory in contemporary Germany.Germanic literaturejsc2013Germanic Languages and LiteraturesDissertationsUncanny Homelands: Disability, Race, and the Politics of Memoryhttp://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:132010
Knittel, Susanne C.http://hdl.handle.net/10022/AC:P:10329Wed, 11 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000This dissertation is an interdisciplinary and comparative study of German and Italian memory culture after 1945. It examines how the interaction between memorials, litera-ture, historiography, and popular culture shapes a society's memory and identity. I focus on two marginalized aspects of the memory of the Holocaust: the Nazi "euthanasia" program directed against the mentally ill and disabled, and the Fascist persecution of Slovenes, Croats, and Jews in and around Trieste. I couple my analysis of memorials to these atrocities with an examination of the literary and artistic representations of the traumatic events in question. My work thus expands the definition of site of memory to encompass not only the specific geographical location of a historical event but also the assemblage of cultural artefacts and discourses that accumulate around it over time. A "site" therefore denotes a physical and a cultural space that is continuously re-defined and rewritten. The two memorials I analyze, Grafeneck and the Risiera di San Sabba, bookend the Holocaust, revealing a trajectory from the systematic elimination of socially undesirable people, such as the mentally ill and disabled, to the full-scale racial purification of the "final solution." The lack of survivor testimony about these sites has been a major factor in their continued marginalization within the discourse on Holocaust memory, which is why it is all the more important to consider the way these events figure in other genres and other media, such as novels, short stories, poems, biographies, TV-dramas, and theatre plays. This approach allows me to shed new light on canonical works such as Günter Grass's The Tin Drum or the TV-Series Holocaust and to bring into focus works that have so far not received the critical attention they deserve. Through my analysis I show how certain authors participate in a process of vicarious witnessing, lending their voice to those who were not able or permitted to speak for themselves. By bringing these underrepresented sites and memories into focus, I not only argue for a more inclusive memory culture but also reveal how the politics of commemoration continue to lead to the exclusion of persecuted minorities. Thus, my dissertation participates in the broader project within Holocaust studies of opening the discourse to de-particularized, transnational perspectives and other victim groups.Comparative literature, Germanic literature, Romance literaturesck2112Germanic Languages and Literatures, ItalianDissertations